ABSTRACT

Humans and their ancestors have lived in social groups for millions of years. This history has provided selection pressures for the ability to predict conspecifics’ actions (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). Though it might be possible to predict people’s behaviour directly by simple associative learning, doing so on the basis of inferred mental states and traits-including intentions and goals, emotions, personality traits, and beliefs-is more economical and may yield more accurate predictions, especially in complex social contexts (Dennett, 1987; Humphrey, 1984). Evidence from social and developmental psychology shows that humans are very sensitive, from an early age, to cues that can enable predictions about behaviour. In fact, our propensity to attribute mental states extends to inanimate objects, appearing as a tendency towards anthropomorphism (Boyer, 2003; Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000).